As a longtime lurker in online writing communities, I say in good authority that sentiments there against AI are not amicable to say the least. AI writing is trashed, and the writer is trashed alongside it. And why shouldn’t this happen, right? AI writing takes no effort. You just have to write a few sentences of your prompt, and voila, there you have a bland story which is mechanical and more like information than prose.

The same writing that human writers spend dozens or hundreds of hours painstakingly revising through multiple rounds of editing, the AI writers spout out in a matter of minutes. 

Dwelling in these sorts of writing spaces, I also adopted a similar binary viewpoint: AI writing bad, human writing good. Even the slightest taint of AI is enough to taint a write-up and turn it into something unholy in the world of writing.

A few days ago, though, came the day of reckoning. One of my friends showed me a story he’d written in English. His English was a bit lackluster to say the least, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that the story lacked any grammatical, spelling, and punctuation errors. The prose was also pretty good. 

In half-jest and half-disbelief, I asked: “You wrote this entirely yourself?”

“Of course,” He paused, then added, “I used AI to help with some prose, mainly Grammarly, but other than that its all my own.”

I was disgusted with him and initially berated him, but he told me something that changed my whole opinion on this matter. “Well, if I don’t use AI, I can’t really write. What’s better, me not writing at all or using Grammarly to fix my grammar?”

I realized that for people for whom English is their 2nd or 3rd language, can we really expect them to have a perfect command of English? I mean, in writing communities, even using Grammarly is frowned upon. “As a writer, you should know grammar; if not, you have no business writing,” Is their go-to response at such occasions. But after the conversation with my friend, I’ve come to find such extremist sentiments to be wholly inhumane to non-English speakers. 

This seems like a way to gate-keep literature for the English-speaking and elite. Isn’t it better for people like my friend to write with AI assistance than write nothing at all? Because if not for AI, whatever he would write would be almost ineligible.

Of course, I don’t endorse just giving a prompt to AI and labelling the answer as your own story. What I mean is that there needs to be more nuance to this matter. And, mind you, this issue is clearly nuanced. People don’t realize this, but the use of AI in writing intersects issues such as inequality, gate-keeping, and elitism. 

I am, of course, not endorsing the use of AI to shape the style or execute the idea. As I said in the beginning, AI writing is unoriginal and bland, and every story it churns out is the same as the one before it. What I am advocating for is that views on AI use regarding fixing punctuation, spellings, and grammar should not only be allowed but encouraged, especially when it concerns non-English speakers. Many young writers from third-world countries who have not had the resources or experience to learn formal English or grammar should still be able to write. Because writing should be universal, not gate-kept.